Business customers of Vodafone-owned Cable & Wireless have been complaining about the telecoms outfit this morning after it was hit by a major outage apparently affecting the whole of the UK.

The Register understands that punters are unable to receive inbound calls to the category of numbers whose prefix includes 0800 and 0845.

When anyone dials those numbers, recorded messages are returned saying either: "This number is busy" or "This number is blocked".

A source told us that the system has been down since around 8am and that an engineer was apparently dispatched by C&W to Glasgow to try to fix the problem by replacing some hardware.

Another engineer from Ericsson is said to be restoring the Edinburgh connection. Apparently, customers affected can prefix their calls with 1280 to route outbound calls while C&W fixes its network.

The latest reports from biz punters blighted by the problem suggests that the work won't be completed until mid-afternoon at the earliest.

Outage could lead to early start in pub for some

El Reg asked C&W to comment on this story. A spokesman told us that only a limited number of customers were affected by the outage. "We've got people looking at it right now and we hope to have it fixed soon." ®